1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns sharing of Internet advertising revenue. More specifically, the invention pertains to the sharing of revenue between an advertisement sponsor, a search engine provider, and an end user of the search engine by crediting the end user a portion of advertising revenue collected by the search engine provider from the advertisement sponsor after confirming that the end user has printed out an advertisement on a printout of a search result web page.
2. Related Background Art
Currently, a common method for advertising on the Internet is a system called pay-per-click advertising or PPC advertising. PPC advertising is an arrangement between webmasters, acting as publishers, and advertisers or advertisement sponsors, in which the webmasters display clickable links leading to the advertiser's websites, in exchange for a charge-per-click of the link. In this system, the advertisers may be susceptible to overcharging for the clicking of links. A common example in which online advertisers may be overcharged for clicked links is click fraud. Click fraud occurs when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an advertisement link, for the purpose of generating a charge-per-click without having actual interest in the target of the advertisement's link. In this case, the advertiser may be excessively charged for the false clicks.
Another example of inaccurate charging of online advertisers is when a user accidentally clicks on an advertiser's link. When a user accidentally clicks an advertiser's link, the user may quickly return to the previous website without actually viewing the advertiser's website. Yet another example of inaccurate charging of online advertisers is when a user clicks on an advertiser's link, but the web browser malfunctions and never displays the advertiser's website. In this case, the advertiser may be charged at the moment the user clicked the link with no assurance that the user actually viewed the advertiser's website or advertisement information. Accordingly, in each of these examples (click fraud, accidental clicking, and web browser error), advertisers may have to pay for advertisements that are, in reality, not viewed by the target audience.
In addition, PPC advertising does not currently provide an incentive for Internet users to click on an online advertiser's link. After a user conducts a search, there is no real motivation for the user to depart from the search results and click on an advertiser's link to view advertisements in the middle of conducting an Internet search. Of course, if the user is interested in the advertisement and were to click on the advertiser's link, the user is provided access to the advertiser's website, but the user is not provided with a monetary benefit for viewing the advertiser's website.
Moreover, in PPC advertising, advertisers generally bid on keywords that they believe their target market would type in a search bar when searching for a product or service. When a user enters a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword bidding list, the advertiser's advertisement may or may not be shown depending on how much the advertiser bids. The list of advertiser links appears in order of the amount of the bid and is usually listed on the side of the web page or sometimes on the top of the web page, or what may be referred to as the “gutters” of the web page. Therefore, even though an advertiser is bidding on keywords and the advertiser's links are being listed with the search results of a search page, a strong possibility exists that the user will not click on the advertiser's link.
Thus, what is needed is an online advertising scheme that will provide end users with some monetary incentive to view advertisers' websites and a way for advertisers to better ensure that the end user has actually viewed their advertisements.